HackMag

Until recently, based on the results of surveys and personal experience, I had the impression that users believe that the value of data stored on a device greatly exceeds the cost of the device itself. Why until recently? Well, the current US dollar exchange rate means that I haven't seen such surveys among new iPhone users :).

According to cvedetails.com, more than 1,305 vulnerabilities have been found in the Linux core since 1999. Sixty-eight of these were in 2015. Most of them don't cause many problems (they are marked as Local and Low), and some may cause problems only if they are attached to certain applications or OS settings. In reality these numbers are not that big, but the core is not the entire OS. There are also vulnerabilities found in GNU Coreutils, Binutils, glibs and, of course, user applications. Let's take a look at the most interesting of the bunch.

Numerous times you used to help your friends and people when their PCs fell to onslaught of malware. So did we. But we got pretty sick and tired of all that and pulled out a trump card by instead compiling a full guide that you can just hand off to the injured party and thus guarantee your non-involvement. Take it and put it to good use!

The first examples of malware that encrypts files and then demands money for decryption appeared a long time ago. Just remember Trojan.Xorist with its primitive encryption algorithm based on XOR, or Trojan.ArchiveLock written in PureBasic, which used regular WinRAR for encryption and Sysinternals SDelete for deleting encrypted files, and demanded as much as five thousand dollars for decryption. However, it was CryptoLocker that established the bad trend among virus writers to use the latest achievements in cryptography as quite stable encryption algorithms. Today, we will investigate several encryption-based trojans which emerged after the notorious spread of CryptoLocker on the internet (or at the same time).

The first examples of malware that encrypts files and then demands money for decryption appeared a long time ago. Just remember Trojan.Xorist with its primitive encryption algorithm based on XOR, or Trojan.ArchiveLock written in PureBasic, which used regular WinRAR for encryption and Sysinternals SDelete for deleting encrypted files, and demanded as much as five thousand dollars for decryption. However, it was CryptoLocker that established the bad trend among virus writers to use the latest achievements in cryptography as quite stable encryption algorithms. Today, we will investigate several encryption-based trojans which emerged after the notorious spread of CryptoLocker on the internet (or at the same time).

Nowadays the Russian segment of the Web is not dominated by CryptoWall or CTB-Locker, Russia has seen the formation of an "ecosystem" consisting of other types of ransom trojans, which generally don't enter the global arena. Today, we will learn about some of them and, as a bonus, we will briefly run through some "fashionable" trends in global ransomware.

Since its rise Windows was a natural habitat for all kinds of malware. Now the OS itself seems to have become one big trojan. Right after being installed it starts acting weird. The data flows in rivers to dozens of servers belonging to Microsoft and its partner companies. We will try to look into complaints of espionage manners of Windows 10 and find out what data it sneaks and where it sends it.